Co-convened with OCEANIX, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Ocean Engineering and the The Explorers Club, BIG’s proposal explores the next frontier for human settlements, and the possibility of living sustainably and in harmony with life below water!

The initiative was created in late 2018, as entrepreneur Marc Collins Chen (ex minister of tourism in his native French Polynesia) started a company called OCEANIX that is aimed at building the off-shore urban infrastructure.

As minister he found out that the sea level rise was a threat to the group of 118 islands and that 1/3 of all of the French Polynesian islands would be submerged by either 2035 or 2050. Furthermore an estimated 40% of the world’s population (2.4 billion) live in coastal regions and will likely be impacted by rising sea levels as a result of climate change.